Let there be no mistake, the senior judges are spitting blood over the Government's drive to make the civil courts self-funding.

The inevitable consequence of such a policy is that it will put plans to upgrade the dilapidated Commercial Court on ice for the foreseeable future and lead to a rise in civil court fees.

Speaking in the House of Lords before Christmas, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, said the "totally misconceived" policy jeopardised "the gains achieved as a result of the Access to Justice reforms".

Strong stuff. Sadly, however, there seems little prospect of this clamour for better resources being heeded. Nor should we be surprised that the Government is so determined to make the civil courts pay their way. After all, it has already privatised large swathes of the civil legal aid system.

And, to be frank, a spanking new Commercial Court will not win the Government the next election, whereas getting the trains to run vaguely on time will probably prevent it losing it.

Which means the civil court judges are almost certainly going to have to make do with the facilities they have got, despite the commendable efforts of the new Lord Mayor of London, Gavyn Arthur, to shame the Government into providing some cash for a new purpose built Commercial Court.

The good news is that claims that millions of pounds of invisible earnings will leave the country unless something is done to improve the Commercial Court's facilities are a touch overblown.

As a recent Big Question survey bore out, the judiciary is still held in high esteem. And it is the quality of the judges, rather that the quality of the courts themselves, that will always be the decisive factor when companies decide where to take their claims.

Add to this the range of legal expertise available in the City of London and the fact that US companies and those based in other common lawjurisdictions feel at home in the English courts and you have a winning formula.

No, far more serious is the danger that ever higher court fees will deprive the public of their right to have their disputes heard in the courts. If the Government pushes too far in this direction it will surely expose itself to a claim under the European Convention on Human Rights – although admittedly this assumes that the UK will remain a signatory to the convention, which is increasingly being regarded as an irritant by the current administration.